Thursday, October 30, 2014

BYU Recycling builds Recycle Maze to raise recycling awareness

Feeding off the tradition of corn mazes being a popular Halloween activity, BYU Recycling has built a Recycle Maze this Halloween for students to enjoy that also serves a reminder for students to recycle more.

The Recycle Maze has been up all of October and is located just behind the Ellsworth Building, which is on the corner of 2230 north and University Avenue in Provo. BYU Recycling has opened the maze up to the public every Monday night throughout October and will also be open on Halloween night from 8 to 10 p.m.

“It’s mostly for fun I think, but it also serves to be a visible and tangible manifestation of what we’re doing with recycling at BYU,” said Stuart Radford, a sophomore at BYU and a member of BYU Recycling since January.

Radford further explained that many people at BYU will throw their soda cans or office papers in the recycling bins at BYU, but after that have no idea what happens to it. By coming to the Recycle Maze, students can see what happens with the stuff they recycle.

BYU Recycling places blue recycling bins all around campus in hopes that students will recycle their waste instead of just throwing everything into the garbage can. BYU Recycling then goes around a collects the recycled material and compresses it into bales of recycled material. After doing this, they will ship the bales of recycled material to various plants that take the material and turn it into products.

With the Recycle Maze, instead of immediately shipping these bales off to the plants, the BYU Recycling team uses the bales they have collected and constructs them into a maze. As Radford explained, this year they started by making a maze design with a computer program. After the design was set, they spent eight hours constructing the maze with the help of forklifts. As they gathered more bales of material throughout the month, they added them to the maze, thus making it on ongoing building project.

“If you don’t think that recycling matters or makes a difference if you recycle, it obviously does. I mean you can come see at the recycle maze that if you recycle and if you use those bins that we put all around campus, you can make a difference and you contribute to helping us reduce waste and recycle the materials we use here at BYU,” Radford said.


This actually wasn’t the first year that BYU Recycling has put this Recycle Maze together, but it was the first year that they publicized it so much. They had a booth setup in the Wilk to advertise and they also passed out flyers. This led to a fairly large crowd at the maze that built up throughout the month. Radford estimated around 50 people on the first Monday and about 300-400 on this most recent Monday.

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